For anyone who has ever struggled with addiction, the path back to a clean and sober life can seem to be a perilous and daunting task, fraught with loneliness and pain. However, one man has chronicled his own personal journey back from the brink in a new, soul-bearing memoir, and is now using his sobriety to help empower others who are still struggling with their own personal demons.
In Case of Emergency, Break Childhood: A Gen Xer’s Survival Guide to Anxiety, Addiction, and Accidental Enlightenment features the heartfelt writings of North Bellmore author Jason Mayo, founder of addiction, recovery, and mental health advocacy platform Sober Not Subtle, and a professional in the addiction recovery and behavioral health fields.
As per the book’s official synopsis, In Case of Emergency, Break Childhood “is the unfiltered, painfully funny, and surprisingly hopeful memoir of a Gen Xer who came of age with a latchkey, a bottomless bowl of Honeycombs, and a growing list of reasons to disappear. From self-sabotage and emotional landmines to a slow descent into booze, pills, lies, and trading the people he loved for the numbness he craved, this is the story of a boy who never quite fit in and a man who tried everything not to feel – until he had no choice but to face himself.”
Despite its serious themes, the book is infused with humor and Gen X nostalgia, capturing the uniquely Long Island rhythm of growing up in the ’80s and ’90s.
In the memoir, Mayo is very candid about the addiction issues he’s faced, including the tribulations – first encountered at a very early age – that contributed to patterns he would later confront in recovery.
“The book is my story from a childhood that involves trauma,” he said. “It talks a lot about mental health and my story of addiction with pills and alcohol and how it affected me and my family. And so, it's really a combination of story of trauma, addiction, and mental health, and it goes right up until the day I got sober.”
“And along the way, there's some flashbacks, flash forwards, that type of stuff, but my hope is to really try to amplify people's voices when it comes to mental health and addiction,” Mayo continued. “I want to try to get rid of stigma, to normalize the conversation around all of that, because we lose too many people because they stay silent.”
Mayo said the memoir began unexpectedly, after a writing assignment from his sponsor during early recovery.
“I got sober in 2010 and after entering a 12-step program, my sponsor asked me, as a ‘step one’ assignment, if I could write down my drinking history,” he said. “I've always been a writer. I've always loved writing, I've always blogged, I've written for different publications. So instead of just jotting some stuff down in a notebook, I decided to write, like, 15 pages and laid it out chronologically, almost like a mini-memoir.”
The assignment complete, Mayo put away the writings and forgot about them; however, upon stumbling upon them 15 years later while cleaning out his Google Drive, he revisited the insightful text and realized it was something that he could actually build upon in a meaningful way.
Instead of simply putting the text away, Mayo started writing.
“I hadn’t talked about my story in that way before. I've been recovering out loud for a couple of years now, but it's very different talking about your stuff and going back and reading something that was that raw,” he said. “It really picked a lot of scabs reading it, because I hadn't read it since I first got sober. And at that point I was at my worst, my most vulnerable. So, it brought back a lot of emotions.”
Sitting down, dissecting, and writing brought up a lot of things he hadn’t thought about, Mayo said, and one of the things it did for him is make him look at his childhood trauma…something he said he didn't even realize that he had.
“You know, when I think of trauma, I always think of, you know, the vet coming home from combat or a first responder, or maybe a survivor of domestic violence,” he said. “But my trauma started when my parents got divorced when I was eight years old, and that flipped my world upside down. I really had never thought about all that, so going through and writing the story was cathartic. In the end, I'm glad it's out there.”
In Case of Emergency, Break Childhood was published through Mayo’s own Sober Not Subtle Media this past September, in conjunction with publishing services outfit A-Team Press. It’s available at most major online booksellers such as Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books; in addition, the physical copies are also beginning to reach more and more brick-and-mortar retailers by the day.
Copies of In Case of Emergency, Break Childhood are also on offer via the Nassau and Suffolk County Library Systems, something that Mayo said that he especially got a kick out of.
“I actually was in Massapequa for a meeting the other day at the library, and I found the book. That was so cool,” he said.
For those of you who are textually-challenged, however, an audio book version of Mayo’s book has also just been released, read aloud by the author himself; the act of recording it, he said, was not always pleasant.
“Going through all of that again almost killed me so, if you want to hear a grown man cry while reading his own stories, pick up the audiobook,” he laughed. “There's one chapter, called White Knuckles and a Broken Parachute, about one of the dozens of times I tried to stop drinking on my own, and I tried to paint the picture of how desperate someone could become. The realization of, ‘I can't live with drugs and alcohol, but I don't think I can live without them,’ and it just gets me because at that point, I was nearing my bottom. And so, when I read it, no matter how many times I read it, I start to cry.”
Rather than being embarrassed by laying bare his emotions, Mayo saw it as a badge of strength, and a way to make his journey relatable to the reader; Mayo said the emotional vulnerability is intentional, part of telling the story honestly – though he noted the memoir also includes plenty of humor.
“Anything that you can do to generate an emotional reaction from a listener, that's genuine and authentic, is definitely, something that's good,” he said. “So, there's a lot of emotion. There's a lot of laughing in there, too, but you know, there is a lot of emotion.”
Following his sobriety, Mayo has embraced the culture and is now using the lessons he learned to help guide others struggling with mental health concerns and addiction themselves.
In fact, his drive to help others actually encouraged Mayo to leave a 30-year career in the visual effects and animation industry and pivoting full-time to the behavioral health field.
“I started talking to some people that I knew from my personal recovery and someone introduced me to the profession of peer advocacy, which is basically someone with lived experience that receives training and becomes certificated to help people living with substance us disorder.” he said. “For the first time in years, I got to start spending time with my wife and kids and watching shows on Netflix and eating dinner with them and even started a stream playing video games on Twitch, because it was something that I love to do.”
In addition to founding Sober Not Subtle, Mayo is now a Certified Recovery Peer Advocate (CRPA). He is currently employed at THRIVE Recovery Community and Outreach Centers that is part of the 142-year-old Family and Children's Association, one of the largest and oldest not-for-profits on Long Island, where he uses his lived experiences to help others. He facilitates a weekly “dads” group, runs sessions with inmates at the Nassau County jail, trains others in Narcan use, and speaks at schools to share his lived experience with mental health and addiction. He’s also an active member of several community action and prevention coalitions.
As for the possibility of another book in the future, Mayo joked that he might need some time before revisiting such an emotionally demanding process, though he acknowledged that telling the story was ultimately worth it if it helps even one person on their road to recovery.
“It was a lot,” he said with a laugh. “It challenged me as a writer, but also it really helped me emotionally, and I knew that it would, and the main message that I want to get out there is that people don't have to do things alone. I know, it's definitely hard to ask for help. I was a guy that had my own business. Two kids, amazing wife, tons of friends on Facebook, and nobody had any idea how much I was suffering. So, hopefully people can read my story and maybe see a little bit of themselves and know that it's okay to not be okay, and that you don't have to do it alone.”
To find out more about Jason Mayo and his story, please visit the following links:
- Insta: Sober not Subtle
- Insta: Personal
- FB
- Amazon Link to book
- Sober Not Subtle Website